


Some Sunny Day

by Boji



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-14
Updated: 2008-03-14
Packaged: 2018-02-18 13:08:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2349518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boji/pseuds/Boji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Hart knew who Jack Harkness was of course.</p><p>I'd say this is set some twenty years prior to <i>Kiss, Kiss Bang Bang</i> on the original time-line as it were. Otherwise known as a glimpse into Jack Harkness's past, in some far flung 51st Century future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Sunny Day

The girl who squeezed in next to me at the bar was a looker. Brunette. Mouth slick with red lipstick, eyes dark with smudged pencil. The same pencil she'd used to draw stocking-seams on with. Those lines, which ran up the back of her calves and clung to the curve behind her knees, were my ticket into a warm bed and even warmer places - theoretically. All I had to do to get a weekend pass was tell her I could turn her _Bisto_ -stockings into real ones. But, I couldn't _muster the enthusiasm._ I was actually running the risk of failing this gig because I couldn't muster the bloody enthusiasm. Next step up from that was not _cutting the mustard._ Oh I had the poncy-lingo down alright, but I couldn't see the point. Telemetry, weapons, made sense. This? This was akin to elephants dancing in tutu's. Or had it been hippos, in that daft piece of so-called entertainment I'd been forced to watch?

Over the brunette's shoulder I watched Jack-blasted-Harkness dancing cheek to cheek with some girl in Wrens uniform. Couldn't prove it, but I was sure he'd cribbed his fancy footwork from the bloke who danced round lamp-posts in the rain.

"Do you come from the same place back home, you and your friend?" the brunette asked me. 

"Jack and I? You could say that." My voice was flatter than my interest. I knew that wooing the girl off her feet (and out of the little number she was wrapped in) was the point of the exercise, but I couldn't get past the idea that I was feeling up a construct. Her curves? All light and shadow, with the odd dust particle mixed in. Which was why the blasted _beau-charming_ of the agent cadet corps was going to be the one to get the girl-that-wasn't, ace the sim, and no doubt lord it over me. 

I turned my attention back to the bar. A construct of a barman handed me a couple of cocktails. All mock-up, no kick, just like the girl. The faux-drink was topped off with an olive and a sharp sliver of wood that could poke someone's eye out, easy. I wondered what would happen if I tried. Her eye. Or Harkness's. I plucked the olive out of its liquid bed, bit through surprisingly real fleshy fruit and then reached out to take the brunette's hand. First I closed my fingers round her wrist, gently. Then I pressed against her pulse-point, hard. 

"Ow!"

"Abort feminoid." She disappeared mid-complaint, winked out as my words activated her off-switch. 

On the dance floor I saw Harkness pause. He stepped back from the fake-girl he was dancing with and made his way through the crowded dark bar towards me. "You want to take it from the top?" he asked by way of introduction.

"Feels fucking pointless this does," I said, sliding into the nearest available banquette. "I know I should ask you what you told her, keep in character like, but all this sliding through the shadows... Well, it's a waste of bloody time isn't it?"

Harkness grinned. "It's part of the job. You'll get used to it." 

He slipped into _charming_ as easily as he reputedly slipped between monogamous twosomes and threesomes. It didn't mean _that_ was what he was like when you got him alone, in the tiny sound-proof cells we got to call our own. 

"Cadet-Captain Jack Harkness." Harkness held out his hand. We shook. 

His was a good grip. Steady. I figured he was right at home with any hand-weaponry and yeah, that he could probably coax milk or music from any creature's erogenous appendage. "Is there anyone on training rotation who doesn't know who you are?" I asked, as he sat himself down in the seat opposite mine. 

The table between us was a still life: a half empty bottle of wine, a stained cork and an littered ashtray. The stale fags did a good pungent imitation of real. 

"There are probably some holo-spots somewhere that haven't received the ad but, yes I'm the TA's most wanted. The beau-faced boy from the boeshane peninsula." Harkness picked up a discarded cigarette packet, tapped on it twice and re-opened it. 

Previously empty, now full. 

Didn't take a ciggy and, yeah I wondered what he'd meant by the offer - if anything. For all I knew, this was part and parcel of the test that I'd aborted and was heading to fail. Had a vague idea that an offer of a smoke had been unspoken code back in the pre-historic period we were supposed to be studying. But I couldn't tell if Harkness's move was loaded with nuance or nux-waste. He lit a cigarette and one-handed threaded it through his fingers, over and under, speeding up as he went. 

I waited for the glowing paper to catch against his skin, waited for him to drop it. I waited. And watched. "Scuttlebutt right then? Did piss off one of the brass?" I asked.

"You going to introduce yourself?" That question came with the tilt of his head and a raised eyebrow. 

"Now that I've told you you've pissed off one of the brass, yeah might as well. John Hart." I'd tried the name on for size just that morning. "You're no-longer bunking solo."

"What?" The cigarette sizzled, then bent and broke against the table top. "D'you know what I had to do for that sleep allocation?" 

I knew damn well it was a rhetorical question. And I wasn't about to tell him that rumour had it he'd puckered up, or puckered open, in order to get that privileged solo allocation. And yeah, I wondered what he'd done to get me booted into his living space. "Want a drink?"

"Don't you mean the illusion of one?" he asked me, reaching across to the next table. Pilfering a glass he poured himself what looked and smelt like a glass wine from the half empty bottle that taunted us. 

He slammed it back in one shot, then grimaced. 

"No, I mean a drink." 

 

Join the TA and until you make it clear of third rotation there's no drinks, no smokes, no stims. Not real ones. Oh, you can get thetas from the med supervisor if you're pushing your adrenals too hard but... no alcohol or wave-enhancers. No alphas or betas. No floaters or flyers. No real buzz to speak of but exhaustion. Scuttlebutt was that they cracked the tazer-whip on plant-life and chem so as to see who got around restrictions with initiative. Me? I'd traded the chemical compositions of two recreationals for time down the line. Real vintage booze picked up for a song in France during the inter-war. I'd been keeping it for a special occasion. Getting my commission or winning big at the gaming tables when I fucked-off on furlough. But, yeah I knew that showing up at Jack's door with a bottle of the real stuff would make my presence less of a kick in those perfect white teeth of his. Poster-boy indeed.

~ ~ ~ 

A thirty-slot later and I was thumb-tapping the id-panel outside his door. A thirty slot after that and we'd kicked off our boots and were lounging on floor, leaning back against the bunk base. Lights low and expectations rising. "I used to have a real bed," Jack sounded almost mournful. "This am-rota. Before you came along."

"Want me to say sorry?" I watched him tilt his head back and my gaze followed his. 

The slit of a skylight winking above us could open to show a whole meter-length of sky. Some perk. I hadn't seen real sky in what? Eleven months? Thirteen? I stopped thinking about the perks allocated to poster boys, versus those caged by paupers and, instead, focused on peeling the foil off the bottle top slowly. It came off in a curl, like conduit from around bio-wiring. I then stabbed the blade of my Swiss army knife into the cork.

"Don't those things come with a bottle-opener?" Jack asked me.

"Not if you go for military hardware. None of that time-touristy shit for me." Easing the cork free, I grinned. "Mattresses aren't code-locked to the frames are they?" I asked as the _Courvoisier_ uncorked with a pop.

"Why Champagne?"

"Failure's a good enough reason to celebrate, don't you think?" I pulled a jumper from my kit-bag, unrolled it carefully and retrieved two glasses. Poured us both a drink, handed the first off to Jack, wondering if he'd ask where I got the champagne from - or when. "Me? I bottomed out on today's sim, failed to woo a photon-female. And you? Here's to who the hell you did to piss off the brass, and get saddled with me." 

"Saddled?" That increasingly familiar grin shone forth. 

"Stuck. Lumbered. Gifted. What ever you did to endure my company, I salute you." I raised my glass in a mock toast, then let a mouthful of fizzing bliss slide down my throat. "I hit the jack-pot, Cadet-Captain Jack Harkness. Till you're reprieved, I only have to suffer your smelly feet and your stinky farts," I said, with a matching grin of my own. 

"What else shall we drink to? Jack asked. 

"Whatever you bloody wish!" I drank another mouthful, slowly. "We can drink to absent friends. Planets that are long past their prime... To surviving this hell-pit through to graduation, when time herself will bow down before us like a great big...

"Peace," Jack said quietly.

"A great big piece of?"

"No," Jack coughed up a laugh. "Here's to peace accords holding." The smile that settled in his voice? Damn if I couldn't see it in his eyes. 

I leaned in after we clinked glasses, paused right by the side of his mouth so my breath was all the kiss he could savour. Those same blue eyes then held me in their sights, calculating. He raised an eyebrow in question. 

"We're going to get to know each other eventually," I said. "Why not now?"

I took that kiss with a tad too much pressure, and the next with a gentle nip. Jack? He gave as good as he got. His tongue as thorough as his fingers which tugged at button holes, pulled fastenings apart and slid into my pants. And yeah, I'd gone commando and yeah that first time was a tug of war. Which doesn't mean it wasn't as much fun as blasting off into the atmosphere, your teeth rattling against the g's. 

Later, when our two mattresses took up all the available floor space, we lay on crumpled sheets, drank the rest of the champagne and played that ancient century game of twenty questions. It took us years to get to know each other. It took us moments. And if I could bottle that memory like sparking wine, I'd be forever straddling Jack, my fingers peeling us out of our clothes, his pert cock was as pretty as his lovely mouth. I wet him down with champagne and licked up the flavour. And Jack? He opened me up with one thrust, opened me up with the smooth, green-glass neck of that bottle.

~ ~ ~ 

You're not the first.

There's been many a girl in many a bar who asked if I enlisted with Jack, if I knew him back home. If we met before the war. Most often they meant Hitler's war. My war? Jack's? It ripped across more than one world, birthed more than one blood-bath. Battle-scars from a future yet to come fester back through time. As do our kisses. Girls who ask, usually get told that I met Jack with bottle of the good stuff in one hand and my kit-bag in the other. I don't tell them that we met centuries ago and centuries from now. I don't tell them that if we ever manage to make it to anywhere with a whiff of home about it, it will be aeons from where they stand, when they're less than dust. 

His copper with a heart of gold? And eye-candy? 

Jack's got them well-trained like poodles. Which is why they didn't ask the right questions. Didn't ask why a broken man pulls a desperate con that's so shot full of holes a firstie could shut down the op. Didn't ask why I pushed Jack, or why he didn't push back hard enough from the get-go, so as to shut me right down. They didn't ask why I had to make so damn sure that he reboots that I flung him off a fucking building. Oh I found Gray alright, but no one asked what I had to trade for that piece of scuttlebutt did they? 

Would you have asked? If I hadn't pushed that pretty sliver of green glass into the soft hollow of your neck? I did warn you, did say that _if I told you, I'd have to kill you..._

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://nwhepcat.livejournal.com/profile)[**nwhepcat**](http://nwhepcat.livejournal.com/)'s [](http://nwhepcat.livejournal.com/814247.html)**It's the Writers, Stupid!!!!! Ficathon** inspired by  & featuring the quote: __  
> "We're going to know each other eventually, why not now?" - **Humphrey Bogart** in _Across the Pacific._  
>  Written by Robert Carson (story) and Richard Macaulay (screenplay).


End file.
